Analysis and prediction of pilot response time to air traffic control clearances

Kurzfassung

With increasing automation of Air Traffic Management, new digital systems need to adapt to uncertainties caused by human behavior. One such uncertainty is the pilot response time after an air traffic control clearance issued by the Air Traffic Controller (ATCO). This study investigates factors influencing pilot response times using the Swedish Civil Air Traffic Control (SCAT) dataset by analysing roughly 830,000 clearances collected over 13 weeks. We find that pilot reactions vary significantly depending on altitude, time of day, and the maneuver delta requested by the ATCO. Lower altitudes (0-100 FL) exhibit shorter maneuver initiation delays compared to higher altitudes (300+ FL). The maneuver completion time for heading and level changes strongly correlates with the magnitude of change, whereas this correlation is weaker for speed adjustments. Although slight variations exist between airlines and aircraft types, these factors have less influence on the pilot response time. Based on these findings, we investigate the predictability of both initiation delay and maneuver completion delay. This is done by training and evaluating the performance of a machine learning model. Our model shows that maneuver completion times are highly predictable (R^2 > 0.73) across all clearance types, while initiation delays prove more challenging to forecast accurately.